Reducing Complexity in Software Engineering : SEMAT

In a previous post I talked about the lack of science-based engineering in many software engineers practices. In 2009 Richard Soley, Bertrand Meyer, and Ivar Jacobson started the SEMAT (Software Engineering Method and Theory) organization. They observed that software engineering suffers from:

The prevalence of fads more typical of a fashion industry than of an engineering discipline

The lack of a sound, widely accepted theoretical basis

The huge number of methods and method variants, with difference little understood and artificially magnified

The lack of credible experimental evaluation and validation

The split between industry practice and academic research

(As summarized by Harold Lawson, in his May 2018 Communications of the ACM Viewpoint)

Wikipedia summarizes that The initiative was envisioned as a multi-year effort for bridging the gap between the developer community and the academic community and for creating a community giving value to the whole software community. In the next, upcoming blog posts I will be digging deeper into SEMAT and it’s applications.